


Opaque

by thewaves



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, Character Study, M/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 01:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13113066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewaves/pseuds/thewaves
Summary: The way he, Thomas Hamilton, talked, didn't seem to belong to this world, and yet belonged to it in a way primal, as if waves and blades of grass had endorsed his convictions and the dance of his voice.





	Opaque

He had not meant to prolong that unmerited stage, but he’d found himself tied to the stringed lights of his speech, tied to this charming man alight with something similar and yet so much more distilled. He had known charm, had known rhetoric and story, had felt it and used it with the easiness of someone with no currency nor value, but he did not recognize them in this body — as words that are hands and ends instead of paths tied over themselves. The way he, Thomas Hamilton, talked, didn't seem to belong to this world, and yet belonged to it in a way primal, as if waves and blades of grass had endorsed his convictions and the dance of his voice. He was taller, more handsome than he'd thought, kindly in a way foreign and displaced, as if despite the truth he'd suffered no ill and felt that of the world.

Ink didn’t do him justice, despite his kindness to it the nature he contained seemed to rebel in being distorted so. Perhaps that was why he’d stayed by the leaflet long enough for Silver not to need it. 

The cause he was unfolding for him was foreseeably noble, and, it submerged Silver in a pause too long drawn out, inscrutably unworthy of risking two lives repossessed at the price of so much salt. 

“Isn’t it dangerous to discuss so openly?” he severed the sermon at last, feigning lightness.

Seeming nothing but intrigued, Thomas changed to something deeper, “Few things that matter do not deserve the open — and for people to fight for them to be in it.” 

“Isn't _that_ dangerous for someone in your position to say?” Silver argued without hearing, aided by a smile deliberately misplaced, and felt the stage resettle into a silence unburdened by conviction, and comfortably accompanied by fear. 

In it, he had time to truly read, and found it familiar. 

He chuckled, tightly like a smile for no one’s benefit, “You did not write this paragraph, did you?” he asked though he didn’t need to, “… God, to think rhetoric might be the one shared thread of the two men we knew.”

As Silver kept trailing the paragraph like an artifact, Thomas, unheard, decided. His wrist was discreet, his palm numb. He held it clumsily, but not as much so as he might have once. Now, it carried James’s weight.

“Spare us both, Lord Hamilton.” he’d learnt to know the presence of a pistol held, he could tell the degree to which his fingers were wrong. 

“I’d appreciate another name.” Thomas said with a politeness that defied his class, as if he were really asking. 

“Thomas,” with no commitment Silver complied, carefully struggling through the syllables of a name so distant, so unowned, "I am —” definitions stumbled over each other, betrayed chaos but remained faithful to despair, “not someone who requires that type of greeting.” 

Thomas’s eyes had kept to his features until then, and now markedly found a different purpose. 

Each time someone looked there, like that, like they owned him by it, it was an itch.

“I know who you are.” it didn’t taste like an accusation, it was barely a statement, nearly a reassurance, the weighted substance of it brushed by Silver. 

“And you need to leave.” Thomas picked up the sentence from where it had fallen, the pistol now observing the ground. He glanced at the pebbles leaving space to clay at the end of the street as if he were already charting Silver’s departure. 

Something had changed to his wrist, but Silver smiled, “As much as it has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, I’m afraid I have an ulterior purpose.”

“So I imagined.” his cheeks had dropped, yet kindness hanged onto his skin. 

Silver smiled more, his eyes stayed the same, “I am not sure what he might have told you,“ 

“Everything.” his inflection became different, a vertical quality to it, as if carrying the depth of the earth. 

Silver stopped smiling, “Then you are aware I do know he isn't the man I knew. Nevertheless, I can infer he might prefer his past, or the dark one I lived, to stay severed from this, from you — but I’m afraid I need to speak to him.”

“No.” Thomas stood in it, the lack of anything at all after it making Silver twitch.

“I need to speak to him.” he repeated, intimidation was default, and it saturated his tongue, made the sentence sink, but this man, this limpid man, stood with nature. 

“… James has done many terrible things for understandable ends,” Silver scoffed, Thomas didn’t move, didn’t let dark befall what felt a wound, “I’m sure you know; you might even know the fields-deep chasms that prey on him because of it. I will not let him be devoured by any of them, by anything whose parroting may resemble shame, and, make no mistake, devoured is what he'll be if he kills you.”

“Kill me? That is what you believe?” he instinctively took the idea and set it apart, exiled it to a potential with no basis, ridiculed it, “That Flint — he wants to kill me?”

Watching him attempt to conjure tales of rags, Thomas had tried to strip his threadbare form of the skins of him he’d learnt, but they rebelled into being with each syllable accosted to James or any of the names he carried. In another present, in the courtesy of it, he might have rearranged it for him, “It is strange, how you seem to conceive of him like a dissonance — as if there were to you a creature of rage and a man unknown. Neither is true, I know because I know him, and he knows you. I hope the affection, the genuine friendship he felt for you, for many a reason I hope it was yours, too. If so, you'll listen and you’ll follow.”

“Well, I do not follow.” Silver argued with strident urgency, he readjusted his foot as if dirt inches from that he relieved of his weight might hold him differently, “I took something from him, but that which I took itself took from me and would have kept on taking, he knows that. I took from him but I brought him to you, he himself admitted he would choose you over the world.”

“That choice was of your own making.” Thomas looked to him as if he’d just claimed the world were hollow and hearts flat, “It is difficult to forgive someone for taking change from the world, that change and that way.”

“His rage, his war, they were reality.” Silver kept grasping, began to feel discomfort in being so determinate, so linear, to this man he faced, “They were, but I watched them dissipate. I made them dissipate.” 

“There was no rage then, though I saw no trace of it on him, no air of it telling the tale of the recent passing you describe. As for the rest of it — it might have dissipated around him, but nothing was gone within him, it was so luminous a glory part of it seeped right back into me.” the nausea of hollowness overcame him for a moment, as if Bethlem had reached in and plucked the present out, then he saw fields, lack of ends to them, and breathed again. 

“I do not know what you saw, I do not know what he was before he saw me, but I know what he was when he did. I don't believe all know what it feels like — to know duty in touch before pleasure, and then with it to become as if life had never been until then, as if a divinity within you had never known what shape to take until then and so abstained entirely. I first felt it long ago, I believe James first felt it with me. That is how it felt, then, and for it I am thankful. We didn't escape for months — I’m sure you counted on something of the sort — yet it was not because we had no way to, but because we couldn't hold onto each other running the way we could when still. But then we did, we flew, and night after night life began to settle, and we became more and more like we had been, more and more capable of contemplating things other than us and our togetherness. We both unraveled, and with it came clarity, layers of it, lighting one darkness at a time. In it, I'm afraid you began to look a shadow. I cannot know what you'll be tomorrow, but I know what you are today, what you've been for years now.” 

“He would have died too, his war would have killed him. At times, he seemed to transcend his own end entirely, ready to evaporate in the determinate conception of that war, to be carried to the earth by its inevitability, and leave the rest in inheritance to me, and…” he found himself unknowing on how not to choke on her, “and…”

“That means he trusted you deeply with something as fragile as the world anew.”

“Of course he trusted me.” he spat, raw and unkept, “And I refused to be entrusted with carrying his spoils and his rage.

In these years, I must confess I conceived you much like you are, I couldn't have grasped details such as your kindness, or the kind of translucency to your words that collapses the structure of my own, but I knew you likely wouldn't understand what I'd done, perhaps merely by transposition of others whose course I already knew. I did not find myself caring particularly. Yet, despite all my predictions, I cannot begin to place your pallid reaction to knowing his death so imminent and so incorporated in the change you'd hail.”

The earth itself may have grown heavier by the thing that was now between them, “It is a cruel thing — to shrink one’s chest to fit one heart, to refuse those of others because they beat in agony that surpasses you. There could have been people, in multitudes, in this moment, whose ankles are delivered of chains or laws to lock them, multitudes in this moment whose love is delivered of shame or laws to bind it. I do not know how to relinquish the sound of that. I cannot love him more than I love that, he cannot love me more than he loves that, and I love him for it. But if you have to craft antithesis of loves, I do not know how not to recognize his shape, I cannot say I would not stand between anything and us and beg the world to go. 

You must understand how extensively he’s travelled through the past, how many times we unfolded it until sheer. I would have died myself, somehow not far from him. I would have done so with no companion, no view on change crossing the horizon, but rather motionless and flaxen, misshapen by a feeling I denied power to all my life. I told him so, I watched him learn it, and fight it, and I took up arms myself.” he returned to the present tense as if he’d been carved into the night, “ _Incorporated_ — no. You knew I was alive, you knew where I stood. Knowledge of that — without condition — wouldn't have traded our deaths for that of change, it would have left death hungry and earned change another shepherd.” 

He wasn’t him, he was an ode to him.


End file.
